Plato’s Trial of Athens by Ralkowski Mark

Author:Ralkowski, Mark
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury UK

2.Athenian rhetorical culture

Callicles is different from Polus and Gorgias. Of the three, he is the only Athenian, and he is the one who wants to pursue a career in politics (Grg. 484c). He is the clearest about what he gains from mastering the art of rhetoric – the satisfaction of his political ambitions – and he appears to be ‘a long way further than Polus down the road of deliberate immorality’ (Rutherford 1995: 142).52 From his perspective, Socrates lives an ‘inverted existence’ (Voegelin 2000: 31): ‘for if you are in earnest, and these things you’re saying are really true, won’t this human life of ours be turned upside down, and won’t everything we do evidently be the opposite of what we should do?’ Callicles and Socrates have profound ideological and temperamental differences. They represent different philosophies of life, different ways of living, and their differences go to ‘the spiritual core of human existence’. For Callicles, ‘existence must not be interpreted in terms of Eros toward the Agathon, but in terms of the stronger and the weaker physis. Nature is the fundamental reality, and the victorious assertion of the physis is the meaning of life’ (Voegelin 2000: 28–32; cf. Saxonhouse 1983: 147–8).53

What’s most surprising about Callicles, though, is that he is also the most like Socrates. This is one of the first things we learn about him. Socrates thinks they have a common pathos, because they both have a double eros: Socrates loves Alcibiades and philosophy; Callicles loves Demos, the good-looking son of Pyrilampes, and the Athenian demos (Grg. 481c–2d).54 This last point establishes the strongest link between Callicles and Alcibiades, because their shared eros for the demos is what ultimately explains Socrates’ failure to persuade them of philosophy’s merits. The second thing we learn about Callicles follows from the first: his double eros has left him ‘out of harmony with himself’ (Grg. 482c), because he cannot contradict his beloveds (Grg. 481d). And this has turned him into a demos-slave who must hide his own convictions: he keeps ‘shifting back and forth’, Socrates tells him, because any time he says something that upsets the demos, he immediately changes his position and tells them what they want to hear. It doesn’t matter how childish the masses are; Callicles can’t contradict them, and so he won’t stop saying childish things until someone stops the demos from saying them (Grg. 481e–2a). Plato returns to this point at the end of the Gorgias: ‘it’s a shameful thing for us, being in the condition we appear to be in at present – when we never think the same about the same subjects, the most important ones at that – to sound off as though we’re somebodies’ (Grg. 527d). The state of disharmony with oneself, and the poor deliberation it leads to, are among the primary reasons that Socrates rejects Callicles’ political life as ‘worthless’ and encourages its philosophical alternative (Grg. 527e).

This is already a bold criticism of Callicles and his profession. He sees himself as one

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